Thursday, March 10, 2016

Play Diary #6: Ennui

I haven't actually been playing much over the last week.

Blade and Soul

BnS has been the game I've played most. The warlock patch came out, and they gave you a free character slot, and you get a costume if you level to max before the end of Mar. So I rolled a Blade Master, and have been leveling that steadily.

It's interesting playing a melee character focused on blocking. There's a lot less movement involved than with my Force Master. The Force Master relies mostly on kiting.

However, I think I'm nearing the end of my time with Blade and Soul, as I am starting to lose interest in the game. Still, it was an interesting experience, with a lot of interesting design choices.

The Old Republic

We have a few people on vacation right now, so raiding is curtailed for the next couple of weeks.

Truthfully, I kind of want to quit TOR. I think we're pretty much at the edge of my skill level. There's no new Operation content on the horizon. The current operations are accumulating bugs and becoming broken. For example, right now a bunch of bosses have visuals that no longer match what happens. For example, a death beam goes from Point A to Point B. The beam still goes from Point A to Point B, but visually looks like it is going from Point A to Point C.

Truthfully, I think Bioware has given up on group content almost entirely. They seem to want the game to be a "single-player" MMO, where you generally play by yourself or with a partner, but don't actually form groups as we traditionally think of them.

I don't know. Maybe it's time to cut my losses, acknowledge TOR's change of direction, and find a new game to focus on.

Black Desert Online

The new hotness seems to be Black Desert Online. Normally I'd at least give it a try, but I'm not feeling inclined to. It reads a lot like Archeage, up to the whole PvP'ish endgame. I really would like to see someone do a comparison and say why BDO is better or worse than Archeage.

The other barrier is that everyone seems to be discussing and complaining about the cash shop. There doesn't seem to be much talk about the game itself. I find that a little weird and off-putting.

9 comments:

I've been playing BDO for two week now. I think it is more immersive than AA was. I spend most of my time in game exploring and talking to NPCs. I have some guildies who are leveling and pushing to get to max level and all that but I'm just enjoying the world itself. Couldn't tell you anything about the cash shop as I haven't even opened it up. You only get XP for leveling by killing things. Quests give you things like resources and healing pots also inventory slots. Seems like you can make the game as complicated as you want.

BDO and ArcheAge are fairly similar in that they're both Asian semi-sandboxes. In both you have the option of going the PvP route (individual or guild sieges), or diverting off into crafting, gathering, trading. The biggest difference is that AA had non-instanced housing, which seemed really cool at the time but in reality it just ended up being a real problem to find and keep your house in a scarce market. Housing (and farms and crafting workshops) are instanced in BDO, and you're encouraged to have multiple locations anyway.

I'd also agree with Shawn that BDO has the slightly better realized world.

The cash shop is just awful and will eventually drive players to quit, but that being said the game itself is GREAT. If you like self-driven sandbox MMOs, I strongly recommend it.

It's interesting to see how SWtOR has transitioned from the triple-A "we will more than compete with WoW" mainstream MMO to basically a niche game in regards to its scope, but not necessary its playerbase. The developers have changed the game to cater to its (I presume) most populous player group, the solo/duo players--a stark cotrast to Blizzard where the devs somehow try to convert their playerbase with their large emphasis on raiding as the only fully fleshed-out PvE endgame.

Yeah, it is really interesting that they've gone down this path. Personally, I'm not really sure it's sustainable. Each month they release about an hour of content that does not very replayable. At least, I don't find it very replayable.

The other part that's unfortunate is that I actually though SWTOR did a very good job with raid content. Their op fights were very well designed (if a little buggy).